Freitag, 9. Februar 2018

The Heart of Conrad / Colm Tóibín

Joseph Conrad’s heroes were often alone, and close to hostility and
danger. Sometimes, when Conrad’s imagination was at its most fertile and
his command of English at its most precise, the danger came darkly from
within the self. At other times, however, it came from what could not
be named. Conrad sought then to evoke rather than delineate, using
something close to the language of prayer. While his imagination was
content at times with the tiny, vivid, perfectly observed detail, it was
also nourished by the need to suggest and symbolize. Like a poet, he
often left the space in between strangely, alluringly vacant.

Bettmann/Getty Images Joseph Conrad arriving in New York on the SS Tuscania, 1923His own vague terms—words like “ineffable,” “infinite,” “mysterious,”
“unknowable”—were as close as he could come to a sense of our fate in
the world or the essence of the universe, a sense that reached beyond
the time he described and beyond his characters’ circumstances. This
idea of “beyond” satisfied something in his imagination. He worked as
though between the intricate systems of a ship and the vague horizon of a
vast sea..... [mehr] http://www.nybooks.com/articles/2018/02/22/the-heart-of-conrad/